2018/9/20 Regex tutorial  —  A quick cheatsheet by examples – Factory Mind – Medium

Jonny Fox Follow
CTO@Factory Mind
Jun 23, 2017 · 6 min read

Regex tutorial — A quick cheatsheet
by examples

Regular expressions (regex or regexp) are extremely useful in

extracting information from any text by searching for one or more
matches of a speci c search pattern (i.e. a speci c sequence of ASCII or
unicode characters).

Fields of application range from validation to parsing/replacing strings,

passing through translating data to other formats and web scraping.

One of the most interesting features is that once you’ve learned the
syntax, you can actually use this tool in (almost) all programming
languages (JavaScript, Java, VB, C #, C / C++, Python, Perl, Ruby,
Delphi, R, Tcl, and many others) with the slightest distinctions about
the support of the most advanced features and syntax versions
supported by the engines).

Let’s start by looking at some examples and explanations.

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Basic topics
Anchors — ^ and $

^The matches any string that starts with The ->

Try it!

end$ matches a string that ends with end

^The end$ exact string match (starts and ends with

The end)

roar matches any string that has the text roar

in it

Quanti ers — * + ? and {}

abc* matches a string that has ab followed by

zero or more c -> Try it!

abc+ matches a string that has ab followed by

one or more c

abc? matches a string that has ab followed by

zero or one c

abc{2} matches a string that has ab followed by 2

c

abc{2,} matches a string that has ab followed by 2

or more c

abc{2,5} matches a string that has ab followed by 2

up to 5 c

a(bc)* matches a string that has a followed by

zero or more copies of the sequence bc

a(bc){2,5} matches a string that has a followed by 2

up to 5 copies of the sequence bc

OR operator — | or []

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a(b|c) matches a string that has a followed by b

or c -> Try it!

a[bc] same as previous

Character classes — \d \w \s and .

\d matches a single character that is a digit

-> Try it!

\w matches a word character (alphanumeric

character plus underscore) -> Try it!

\s matches a whitespace character (includes

tabs and line breaks)

. matches any character -> Try it!

Use the  . operator carefully since often class or negated character

class (which we’ll cover next) are faster and more precise.

\d , \w and \s also present their negations with \D , \W and

\S respectively.

For example, \D will perform the inverse match with respect to that
obtained with \d .

\D matches a single non-digit character -> Try

it!

In order to be taken literally, you must escape the characters ^.

[$()|*+?{\ with a backslash \ as they have special meaning.

\$\d matches a string that has a $ before one

digit -> Try it!

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Notice that you can match also non-printable characters like tabs
\t , new-lines \n , carriage returns \r .

Flags
We are learning how to construct a regex but forgetting a fundamental
concept: ags.

A regex usually comes with in this form /abc/, where the search
pattern is delimited by two slash characters / . At the end we can
specify a ag with these values (we can also combine them each other):

• g (global) does not return after the rst match, restarting the
subsequent searches from the end of the previous match

• m (multi line) when enabled ^ and $ will match the start and
end of a line, instead of the whole string

• i (insensitive) makes the whole expression case-insensitive (for

instance /aBc/i would match AbC )

. . .

Intermediate topics
Grouping and capturing — ()

a(bc) parentheses create a capturing group

with value bc -> Try it!

a(?:bc)* using ?: we disable the capturing

group -> Try it!

a(?<foo>bc) using ?<foo> we put a name to the

group -> Try it!

This operator is very useful when we need to extract information from

strings or data using your preferred programming language. Any
multiple occurrences captured by several groups will be exposed in the
form of a classical array: we will access their values specifying using an
index on the result of the match.

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If we choose to put a name to the groups (using (?<foo>...)) we will

be able to retrieve the group values using the match result like a
dictionary where the keys will be the name of each group.

Bracket expressions — []

[abc] matches a string that has either an a

or a b or a c -> is the same as a|b|c -> Try it!

[a-c] same as previous

[a-fA-F0-9] a string that represents a single

hexadecimal digit, case insensitively -> Try it!

[0-9]% a string that has a character from 0

to 9 before a % sign

[^a-zA-Z] a string that has not a letter from a

to z or from A to Z. In this case the ^ is used as
negation of the expression -> Try it!

Remember that inside bracket expressions all special characters

(including the backslash \ ) lose their special powers: thus we will not
apply the “escape rule”.

Greedy and Lazy match
The quanti ers ( * + {} ) are greedy operators, so they expand the
match as far as they can through the provided text.

For example, <.+> matches <div>simple div</div> in This is a

<div> simple div</div> test. In order to catch only the div tag we
can use a  ? to make it lazy:

<.+?> matches any character one or more

times included inside < and >, expanding as needed ->
Try it!

Notice that a better solution should avoid the usage of  . in favor of a
more strict regex:

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<[^<>]+> matches any character except < or >

one or more times included inside < and > -> Try it!

. . .

Advanced topics
Boundaries — \b and \B

\babc\b performs a "whole words only" search

-> Try it!

\b represents an anchor like caret (it is similar to $ and ^ )

matching positions where one side is a word character (like \w ) and
the other side is not a word character (for instance it may be the
beginning of the string or a space character).

It comes with the its negation, \B . This matches all positions where
\b doesn’t match and could be if we want to nd a search pattern
fully surrounded by word characters.

\Babc\B matches only if the pattern is fully

surrounded by word characters -> Try it!

Back-references — \1

([abc])\1 using \1 it matches the same

text that was matched by the first capturing group ->
Try it!

([abc])([de])\2\1 we can use \2 (\3, \4, etc.) to

identify the same text that was matched by the second
(third, fourth, etc.) capturing group -> Try it!

(?<foo>[abc])\k<foo> we put the name foo to the

group and we reference it later (\k<foo>). The result
is the same of the first regex -> Try it!

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Look-ahead and Look-behind — (?=) and (?<=)

d(?=r) matches a d only if is followed by r, but

r will not be part of the overall regex match -> Try
it!

(?<=r)d matches a d only if is preceded by an r,

but r will not be part of the overall regex match ->
Try it!

You can use also the negation operator !

d(?!r) matches a d only if is not followed by r,

but r will not be part of the overall regex match ->
Try it!

(?<!r)d matches a d only if is not preceded by an

r, but r will not be part of the overall regex match -
> Try it!

Summary
As you’ve seen, the application elds of regex can be multiple and I’m
sure that you’ve recognized at least one of these tasks among those
seen in your developer career, here a quick list:

• data validation (for example check if a time string i well-formed)

• data scraping (expecially web scraping, nd all pages that contain

a certain set of words eventually in a speci c order)

• data wrangling (transform data from “raw” to another format)

• string parsing (for example catch all url’s GET parameters, capture
text inside a set of parenthesis)

• string replacement (even during a code session using a common

IDE, for example tranform a Java or C# class in the correspective
JSON object — replace “;” with “,” make it lowercase, avoid type
declaration, etc.)

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• syntax highlightning, le renaming, packet sni ng and many

other applications involving strings (where data need not be
textual)

Have fun and do not forget to recommend the article if you liked it

Soon I will publish a new article containing a list of common

Regex, stay tuned!

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